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During the war, when resources were hard to get, the Empire started to think about a way how to avoid wasting resources on mining stations that would soon be either destroyed by the enemy or would become useless when the asteroids were depleted. Several methods were suggested, and the one that was most likely to be successful was to create a mining platform that could move to the next asteroid field once one was totally depleted. It should also be able to mine in enemy territory and then quickly retreat when resistance was encountered. The stations got additional equipment: a drive to make it possible to move, a better structure so it would be stable enough to fly, and a huge cargo hold to store and transport the mined resources. Of course it had to be armed too, for it now was much more expensive than even the biggest conventional stations, and as the loss of such a platform would have been substantial, it got four gun turrets and several missile launchers. After the first skirmishes it turned out that this platform performed better in combat than most empire ships, and so a second model with better armor was created to serve as a regular empire ship. As a tribute to what it was originally created for, it was called "Mooncrusher".
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